Three Thing Game

Bit late posting this! Back in October myself and three others spent a week developing a video game for the Three Thing Game competition, which includes a 24 hour long crunch time session at the end of the week. Because we wanted to gain some experience with a new technology so that we had something to take away from the competition, the team opted to build a game that made use of the Xbox Kinect.

The three things we were given to base the game around were Grunting, Spring and Light Cycles. After a long discussion about how best to approach the words, we came up with an idea that the whole team agreed on: manipulating the environment around a moving pig to help it reach its destination.

Above is a short gameplay clip. You may notice some small glitches such as the fruit not being collected early on. This is a collision detection glitch that didn’t happen on the lab computers at university, so we missed it.

The idea of the game is to use the Kinect to manipulate objects in the environment. The player could punch to shatter boulders, jump to loosen springs the pig was standing on, and swipe away rain clouds to scare away house cats (it was supposed to be redrawn to look like a bear, but we ran out of time and therefore had to stick with my rushed programmer art).

The time of day changes as the game goes on. At night, the pig gets frightened and speeds up, increasing the difficulty of the game for the player. Because the number of obstacles increases as the level progresses, the game has a rising but varying difficulty curve.

The competition was fierce this time around. Out of 40 teams you needed to make the top 8 to progress to the second round, but we only made the top 12. Despite this we are very proud of what we made as it turned out to be very fun to play.

Although the Kinect briefly let us down during the demonstration it was very well behaved for the most part. Even though we didn’t have access to a Kinect until the weekend, the SDK was friendly enough that I could write the majority of the code we needed the night before, and all we had to do at the weekend was tweak numbers until it recognised our actions in the way we wanted.

All of my fellow team members were absolutely fantastic, giving it their all and focusing smartly on the things that needed doing the most so that we ended up with a playable game that had a start and finish. Even being the victim of a midnight home invasion during the 24 hour session wasn’t enough to stop one of our team members from coming in to work on the game!

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Published by Chris Wickens

Software developer with a drive to develop beautiful, high quality applications. Obtained a Computer Science with Games Development MEng at Hull University. Currently working as an Applications Developer at C A Design Services.
View all posts by Chris Wickens